Trawling around the Internet the other day, I found a video clip of the one-hit wonders Zager and Evans singing “In the Year 2525“. The song came out in 1969. It’s fascinating to listen carefully to the lyrics – a lot of what they thought might happen hundreds of years hence is clearly on the cards right now!
Bringing the future much closer to home, Bathurst Community Climate Action Network held its first Steering Committee meeting for the year last Monday. The meeting decided to work on a project tentatively called “Sustainable Bathurst by 2025”. The idea is to go free-form in imagining a low-carbon future: no idea too loopy! Children are particularly good at imagining because they are free of all the baggage that says “no, that that won’t work”, so we are looking to involve children if we can. (And, of course, it’s children who will inherit the environment we are now creating.) We are also interested in working with visual artists, musicians, writers and video makers – anyone who can help us to imagine and express ideas about a way of life that does not rely on depleting finite resources and pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Rather than being a strictly BCCAN project, we would ideally like to work in partnership with other groups and individuals already working so hard to protect our environment and promote sustainability in areas such as building and design, farming and food, water use and management, education, health, renewable energy, transport and biodiversity. The idea is to gradually build towards an expo – or series of smaller events – that showcase the ideas that people come up with.
The Transition Towns movement points out that humanity used “immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope” (that is, on the way “up” our use of fossil fuels) and that there is no reason for us “not to to do the same on the downslope”. (See www.transitiontowns.org/)
If you’re interested, call BCCAN president John Kellett on (02) 6331 8917.
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The Central West Renewable Energy Group will hold its first meeting for the year on Saturday (January 22) at 2pm at the Bathurst Information and Neighbourhood Centre at 96 Russell Street, Bathurst.
Tracy Sorensen is the publicity officer for Bathurst Community Climate Action Network (BCCAN). Visit www.bccan.org.au.